1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of parallel processing and, more specifically, to providing pipeline state through constant buffers.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical processing environment, and especially in a graphics processing environment, there is a large amount of state information that is transmitted by an application to facilitate the processing of input data. It is particularly advantageous to provide such state information to the different processing engines within the processing environment. For example, it would be advantageous to provide blend state information to a pixel shading engine in a graphics processing pipeline.
One technique for providing state information to the different processing engines and units within the processing environment involves transmitting bundles of state information to each of the engines via hardware. This technique, however, is extremely expensive in terms of die space requirements on the chip and, therefore, an undesirable mechanism for providing pipeline state to the engines.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a mechanism for efficiently providing pipeline state to engines of a processing environment.